Sorry, Hil didn't lose because of fake news. She lost because she was a terrible candidate who didn't connect well with people between NY and CA. Lord knows, she had plenty of money and staff to counter any news and create her own fake news.

Not suckin up and remember My and Gourley's fiasco with the Collinsville Library--may be a couple paragraphs in a piece I'm considering to submit to Oxford American Mag--but Dr. Gourley has the high ground, the bigger story here.

Sorry Dr. Thornton, If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today. The links at the end of my Barnum Blog convince me of something toward which I was leaning for thirty years.

Bruce Gourley wrote:With Trump now in the White House, evangelical Christians are closing ranks even more tightly around their strongman. In the estimation of some observers, so few are the evangelicals who remain committed to a world of truth that American evangelicalism may have finally destroyed itself.

I think the steady exodus that was already in place within Evangelical Christianity in the US will be accelerated by the hypocrisy and total abandonment of any semblance of values or principle that it took to support Trump. But these are people who have made heretics like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer wealthy beyond their wildest dreams with their checkbooks. It's a segment of the population among which gullibility, and naivete' are limitless commodities.

Keeping in mind that Hillary succeeded in convincing three million more Americans that she was the better candidate, the fake news, along with the timed dumps of thousands of mostly fake Wikileaks "hacks" was unprecedented. Only one other individual in history has garnered more votes than Mrs. Clinton did, in any election of any kind. Ultimately, the difference in the three states that had the electoral votes to put the orange haired buffoon over the top was fractional, certainly within the possibility that fake news could have made a difference. That's if there wasn't tampering with machines. As the level of Russian interference becomes more clear, I'm not convinced that didn't happen on Trump's behalf. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/2 ... n-WI-PA-MI

Gourley: With Trump now in the White House, evangelical Christians are closing ranks even more tightly around their strongman. In the estimation of some observers, so few are the evangelicals who remain committed to a world of truth that American evangelicalism may have finally destroyed itself.

One supposes that the “world of truth,” since it isn’t Trump’s, must be Hillary’s, the implied alternative, according to Gourley, who obviously does not consider himself a part of American Evangelicalism. More’s the pity. Of course, it would help if G had defined the “world of truth.” As he left it, Hillary, the personification of subterfuge, is far superior to the rank-closing evangelical Christians, her basketful of deplorables, the demented and xenophobic boobs. But that doesn’t include the elites, who already know among themselves what the “world of truth” is. Perhaps it’s encrypted on Hillary’s servers, which have already been read by the world’s hackers and good for laughable dinner conversations from Tuvalu to the Crimea. Of course, the pesky, deplorable evangelicals are now the only hope of ridding the world of the Muslim “world of truth,” always requiring using the sword as the only tool of converting folks to Islam. Jesus knew this ahead of time and told his disciples to arm themselves.

Stephen Fox wrote:Sorry Dr. Thornton, If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today. The links at the end of my Barnum Blog convince me of something toward which I was leaning for thirty years.

I think you missed the mark on both of these, Stephen. Fox News is pretty well pigeonholed and categorized as the conservatively biased news source, and its feud with the Trump campaign, and its personnel defections leading to drops in ratings have pretty well neutralized its effect. I'd say the impact of the fake emails and documents hacked or invented by the Russians and dropped by Wikileaks was greater than that of Fox News. And moderate or fundamentalist, the SBC has, since the Goldwater days, been a bastion of Republicanism. A lot of key CBF folks, whether they be the Baylor/Texas variety, or the Georgia/Atlanta office variety, are also garden variety Southern Republicans, with just a touch of bigotry seeping through the surface from what's boiling beneath.

Moore is no hero of mine. I well remember him coming to Bama to meet with the fundies in 97 or so and speak against my friend the novelist Vicki Covington when she was a visiting writer at Samford. Albert Lee Smith's Inquisition of Tom Corts centered on Covington in March of 93 when Steve Gaines and Dorsett of Central Baptist Bham was coming to Power. I was stealth monitor in the balcony but when I heard the panel come after Vicki, I came out of the balcony to sit behind Albert Lee on about the 7th row in a church packed full of fundy preachers, almost a thousand of em from across the state.

Corts said: "There is no virtue in sustained denunciation!"

Now Moore is getting a little of his own; then again that's fundamentalism at work.

And Rick Burgess is worried about Sharia Law. Have Mercy on his unwitting soul molesting soul.

William Thornton wrote:Sorry, Hil didn't lose because of fake news. She lost because she was a terrible candidate who didn't connect well with people between NY and CA. Lord knows, she had plenty of money and staff to counter any news and create her own fake news.

Not suckin up and remember My and Gourley's fiasco with the Collinsville Library--may be a couple paragraphs in a piece I'm considering to submit to Oxford American Mag--but Dr. Gourley has the high ground, the bigger story here.

Sorry Dr. Thornton, If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today. The links at the end of my Barnum Blog convince me of something toward which I was leaning for thirty years.

Ed" Stephen I believe you over estimate both the influence of Fox news, and the impact of the SBC takeover on American politics.

William Thornton wrote:Sorry, Hil didn't lose because of fake news. She lost because she was a terrible candidate who didn't connect well with people between NY and CA. Lord knows, she had plenty of money and staff to counter any news and create her own fake news.

She connected with three million more Americans than the orange haired buffoon did, with more Americans than any other candidate ever has, except Barack Hussein Obama.

I posted Gourley's link on the CI facebook wall. Here is one response from a Jeff Jones who I do not know

Baloney. The author misrepresents the facts of that time to support a false, predetermined thesis. The inexcusable defense of slavery was a symptom, not a cause.

Consider that the vast majority of those who fought for the South never owned slaves. Why, then, would they endanger their homes, family, and their own lives if slavery were the cause?

Consider that the 1863 New York City riots were a response to the Emancipation Proclamation, where Northerners violently asserted their young men would not die to free slaves.

A more complete history shows that while ending slavery was paramount to abolitionists, for the South the main causes were 1) burdensome taxes taken from the minority South to be spent in the majority North; and 2) the ignoring of the 10th amendment by a federal government imposing laws on the States without Constitutional authority.

Slavery was abolished in Great Britain by compensating slave owners for the loss of slaves, so they could transition to hired labor. Freed slaves were fully assimilated into British cultures.

Because of the hatred by the violence prone abolitionists, Congress could not reach a suitable, Constitutional compromise to avoid the looming divide. Blacks were no more seen as equals by most Northeners than they were by Southerners.

The Civil War is a direct result of ignoring the Constitution and the intransigence of the abolitionists. Like parts of New England during the War of 1812, Southern states chose the remedy of secession when reasonable compromise failed.

Contrary to politically correct thought, most of the antagonism and overt racism in the South after the war came from a combination of war crimes by Union armies and the widespread and common atrocities by carpetbaggers.

Healing began in earnest largely by the work of Booker T. Washington (if you have not read his writings, you should). By the twentieth century, huge advances in eradicating racism North and South had taken firm root because of the success of his movement and accomplishments.

Unfortunately, WEB Dubois and the NAACP undermined Washington and the successes he wrought by appealing to the greed of many blacks. That racial division sowed by Dubois and the NAACP lasts to this day.

The only hope for healing the scourge of racism today is in Christ. In Whom there is no color, and to Whom there is no race but the holy man race.

Not suckin up and remember My and Gourley's fiasco with the Collinsville Library--may be a couple paragraphs in a piece I'm considering to submit to Oxford American Mag--but Dr. Gourley has the high ground, the bigger story here.

S. Fox "If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today."

Ed: So perhaps not all about the take over or Fox News was/is bad ????????????

Let me lay out my own bias at the beginning. I am unashamedly a Conservative, very conservative, and a Calvinist. I also lean favorably towards the SBC. You all know me. That being said, I am up to my eyebrows in a master's thesis dealing with Southern Baptist beliefs during the Civil War. While I am still a small fish wading in the shallow end of the pool, I think I can say I am as up to date as one can be on this topic.

To the point. The cause of the Civil War was slavery. If slavery had not existed, neither would the war. True, there were other issues, for example, taxation, states rights and so on. All of these were subordinate to the issue of slavery, or they were issues because of the issue of slavery.

In the years before the Civil War, America was overwhelmingly Evangelical Protestant. These Protestants were concentrated primarily within three denominations, the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Baptists. Each denomination experienced schism ... the Presbyterians in 1837, the Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845. The issue in all three cases was slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention came into existence to contend for the continuation of slavery as "God's providential plan for the black race." Along the way, the SBC involved itself in some interesting entanglements dealing with the separation of church and state, its place in the military and how it became a leading cheerleader for Confederate nationalism.

No one who is serious about looking at history can come to any conclusion except that slavery was THE issue of issues, both in the antebellum years and in the war itself.

I might note, even after the war. I read a quote from an author who said that segregation was the new slavery after emancipation.

I don't post much but it is nice to be allowed the occasional posting. Hello to you all. Until the next time.

The Civil War is, and always has been for me, one of the most fascinating events in history. That slavery survived as an economic institution as long as it did, in a country and a culture that was as much under the influence of the Christian church, and the Protestant churches, as it was is one of the most interesting sociological studies of all time. America, one of the foundational successes of the idea of a democratic Republic, and one of the most influenced by the Christian faith, held on to an anti-Christian institution longer than any other industrialized country in the world, fractured, and one of the fractured governments incorporated their belief in the principle that all men are not created equal, and black men are inferior, into their constutition. How much influence did the church have on the culture, for that to be the result? How much does it have now? It is too self absorbed.

Do ready Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams and google Vernon Burton last week on the Monuments at Here and Now, NPR. I think the link is in my Paladin blog

I remain puzzled by Sandy who is an apologist for the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Trey Gowdy and Billy Graham and FBC Spartanburg, but asks the right questions about the Civil War. It's a mystery.

Back to John, Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. The Kabbalah therein is a great history lesson for some of the resolutions you are pursuing.